Yahoo's Project To Disrupt Mobile Publishing

waderoush writes "Right now, content publishers who want to reach readers through dedicated mobile apps have to hire a separate engineering team to build each app — one for iOS (based on Objective-C), another for Android (Java), a third for Windows Phone (C#), etc. Yahoo's Platform Technology Group is working on an alternative: a set of JavaScript and HTML-based tools that would handle core UI and data-management tasks inside mobile apps for any operating system, moving developers closer to the nirvana of 'write once, run everywhere.' The tools are gradually being open-sourced — starting with Mojito, a framework for running hybrid server/browser module-widgets ('mojits') — and Yahoo is showing off what they can do in the form of Livestand, the news reader app it released for the iPad in November. In his first extensive public interview about Mojito and the larger 'Cocktails' project, Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, chief architect at Yahoo's Platform Technology Group, explains how the tools work and why the company is sharing them."

I don't get it.

[mcgrew]

Right now, content publishers who want to reach readers through dedicated mobile apps have to hire a separate engineering team to build each app

Why a dedicated mobile app? What's wrong with HTML? We are talking about books, right? Not Quake or Angry Birds or even a radio station; plain old text. WTF?

Again?

[GreyLurk]

If only there weren't a half dozen other companies like Xamarin, Appcelerator and PhoneGap already doing the same thing, this might be impressive.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anrego]

Hard to sell a subscription to a site.

Easy to sell an app.

This is one of my big gripes with the whole "app" thing. A lot of stuff could just as easily be a website, but is being done as an app for the purpose of generating revenue.

(That's not to say that a lot of apps out there make sense and use features which would be impractical or clumsy as a web page)

Re:Those poor, poor software companies.

[CanHasDIY]

Yea... for a billion-dollar software conglomerate, writing different code for different platforms is no big deal, since they have the resources to do so.

For the indie guys like me, who write apps now and again to supplement the pittance we receive from our corporate day jobs (and are lucky to know even one programming language, let alone three), it's a real pain in the ass.

But then, I guess that's the definition of YMMV.

Re:Again?

[Roceh]

The problem with all of these cross platform frameworks, they work great if your writing a game or a very simple app that consists of a single screen. However as soon as you go multiple screen you find that the UI metaphors each OS has fight each other, namely Android use of a hardware back button and it use of a hidden menu, these just don't gel with iOS way of doing things. You end up having to write two apps within one app anyway, and in javascript...

Re:"Ahem"

[Pieroxy]

If the thing is based on JS, CSS and HTML, I think the answer is pretty obvious: BB browser sucks ass so terribly they'd have to write one from scratch (or to port Webkit)